work. life. open source. diatribes.

I just wanted to point people towards an interesting post from Matt Asay on CNET. Mike has an interesting quote that I like to share:

“Free riding happens, but it hasn’t been an issue that has caused us any major problems. Every biological system has natural things like symbiotic relationships, parasitic relationships, etc. Those same things happen in the Eclipse ecosystem.

But the advantages of working with Eclipse to get things done far outweigh the advantages of getting something for free. Do you really want to rely on someone else to fund a project to solve someone else’s customer problems, rather than yours, and leave it to a process that may take more time than you have?

But it’s not just a time/money tradeoff, but rather a question of what is platform and what is product? Building proprietary infrastructure is rarely a good idea anymore. If a vendor is wasting R&D money on infrastructure then they are both wasting money and time, both of which could be better employed building on Eclipse.

If someone is going to make something proprietary, they need to be really, really sure that it’s giving their company sustaining, differentiating value. If they’re just reinventing the wheel, it’s the wrong business move 99% of the time.”

Eclipse is full of symbiotic relationships. We all need each other to ensure the success and growth of Eclipse as a platform.